Criticizing Religions

[Fluffy Princess Unicorn]

Life is a trial, a test to test our dignity, not to suffer.

I would argue that life's purpose is something subjective and deeply personal that is appointed by one's own self and is different for everyone (depending on what one personally considers to be valuable), rather than life having some type of purpose that is one size fits all. I think the sense of purpose religions appoint to everyone is a pseudo sense of purpose. Essentially, the equivalent of using Duct Tape to fix something broken: yeah, it gets the job done sometimes, but it's not the most effective solution.

[Metamorph]

I'm not saying this from a place of judgment, but if I had to guess, I'd think it's either a "False Consensus Effect" (you have mostly negative thoughts, so you assume others in general have mostly negative thoughts), or it's something you learned from a faulty resource. I strongly doubt that it's the latter, though. If it was, you probably wouldn't be saying it's usually negative emotions that are causing negative thoughts. Emotions can cause negative thoughts, but negative thoughts can also cause negative emotions. It goes both ways. It's been studied and researched pretty well, and it has been established that for most people, and during most of the time, the negative thoughts are causing their negative feelings. In fact, even when it does originate from negative feelings first, having the negative thoughts that follow after them create a cycle between the thoughts and emotions, thus creating a downward spiral. If negative thoughts are following after negative feelings very frequently, it might be time to determine whether or not chemical depression is the underlying culprit. It isn't necessarily that, but if it persists regardless of diligent efforts to resolve it, you can't pin down any particular reason it's there, and nothing you do helps to alleviate how you feel, then there's a pretty good chance it's that.

Anyway, so...was I right about guessing it's a False Consensus Effect?

No.

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development - PMC (nih.gov)

Why do you consider this research faulty? I have observed that people do operate this way. That's why people grow up and they spend all their time worrying. They have accumulated negativity over time. Yes, negative thoughts cause negative emotions in addition to negative emotions causing negative thoughts. It is a feedback loop. But it is a feedback loop that takes people conscious effort to break because the emotional component is automatic and negative emotions are more salient. Negative thoughts are simply thoughts. Thoughts themselves do not cause people to behave in an irrational manner that causes harm to themselves. Thoughts are thoughts. It's only really fear for the most part that causes the negativity bias. Fear is the mind-killer, as the saying goes. If people thought more, they wouldn't have fear, but at the same time, fear shuts down people from thinking in the first place. All negative emotions are really forms of fear. The opposite of love is traditionally hate, and some people say it's "fear, not hate" but the biggest component in hate is fear. Disliking something you're not afraid of is just contempt and apathy, and no one treats those particularly negatively.

[Metamorph]

There is no point in arguing with someone who switches up, twists definitions, and down right lies. Life is a trial, a test to test our dignity, not to suffer.
I recommend you just ignore him/block that idiot.

He's also banned, but the point was to stop other people from falling for him, and to try to help out people like Subteigh and Midnight Maverick who have been negatively influenced by people like him in the past.

[Fluffy Princess Unicorn]

No.

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development - PMC (nih.gov)

Why do you consider this research faulty? I have observed that people do operate this way. That's why people grow up and they spend all their time worrying. They have accumulated negativity over time. Yes, negative thoughts cause negative emotions in addition to negative emotions causing negative thoughts. It is a feedback loop. But it is a feedback loop that takes people conscious effort to break because the emotional component is automatic and negative emotions are more salient. Negative thoughts are simply thoughts. Thoughts themselves do not cause people to behave in an irrational manner that causes harm to themselves. Thoughts are thoughts. It's only really fear for the most part that causes the negativity bias. Fear is the mind-killer, as the saying goes. If people thought more, they wouldn't have fear, but at the same time, fear shuts down people from thinking in the first place. All negative emotions are really forms of fear. The opposite of love is traditionally hate, and some people say it's "fear, not hate" but the biggest component in hate is fear. Disliking something you're not afraid of is just contempt and apathy, and no one treats those particularly negatively.

What you linked is much different than saying peoples' thinking is mostly negative. It's saying people respond more strongly to negatives.

[Fluffy Princess Unicorn]

He's also banned, but the point was to stop other people from falling for him, and to try to help out people like Subteigh and Midnight Maverick who have been negatively influenced by people like him in the past.

Influenced? When did this happen?

[Metamorph]

What you linked is much different than saying peoples' thinking is mostly negative. It's saying people respond more strongly to negatives.

Not really. People responding more strongly to negatives makes their thinking mostly negative because they are around negative information all the time. They spend all their time watching the news, or drinking, or going to doctors, or gambling, and then they are focused on negative things all the time because it is a feedback loop. When you look at people they are always afraid because they feel like they are out of control. They vote for politicians who use platforms of fear and they live on fear. Even this thread shows that, because most of the arguments most people (especially Andy Lee, and as Subteigh said he's not really trolling with his arguments because many people believe those, never mind my point, that he himself believed those even if he also has other accounts he just spams with) used were about religion and fear rather than trying to appeal to the idea of a good God who is responsible for the love, beauty, order, etc. you see in the world, and the negative arguments in turn weren't about how free and happy not believing in God made them feel, they were also about how much the nonbelievers disliked the idea of the fear-based God and about the problem of evil. Heck, the problem of evil is one of the most salient arguments in religion and most people look at people who primarily rely on, say, the Kalaam argument funny.

Negative information is just more salient for people in general, and people focus on that like a feedback loop until it drags most people down to Hell, which is created by their thoughts. That is why the road that leads to destruction is broad, because most people cannot overcome the feedback loop that drags them down. This is perhaps my biggest problem with the "psychology industry," the assertion that there is "normal" and "abnormal" and most people are normal. Most people are miserable, doomed, addicted, and often psychotic. Why do you think beliefs like Peteronfire's are so common? That is the psychotic part. While I would say normal is a good thing, normal does not mean common. In almost all cases, I think the mode is far below the average, and that includes mental health as well as height, IQ (despite the methodologies built into IQ measurements that try to circumvent this,) age, wealth, etc. The reason for this should be clear whenever anyone reflects on it even a little bit. Whenever you look at pictures of the "average person" in most countries, they tend to be the most beautiful people in the world because while imperfections are common, no particular imperfection is common, so all the imperfections essentially average out to a perfect person, and aside from the development of characteristics over time, this is an important reason for why the average is generally much higher than the mode, especially when multiple characteristics are added together in this way.

If most people weren't miserable, they wouldn't be spending all their time watching Oprah, Joel Osteen, Dr. Phil, Glenn Beck, or what have you, and people wouldn't be so addicted to drugs, food, games, sites like these, and more, not that all of those things are bad, but the addiction is bad, because the point of addiction isn't liking something, the point of addiction is to use something as a knife, dissociate and compartmentalize consciousness so there are things you aren't thinking about, which is why even if alcohol isn't related to al-ghol I still think the idea of it in the context of referring to Medusa makes a lot of sense, because the point is to paralyze thought and cut it off. The world we are in is infinitely dark and infinitely heavy, because as Buddha said, the only certainties in life are essentially sickness and death. We live in a society [/meme] that is essentially the equivalent of Buddha's parents, trying to keep the prince in his so-called perfect house enjoying all the luxuries so he won't think of everything, but even the best life in the world the way it is is scarcely any better than the worst due to these certainties. People try to forget them, but aside from the fact closing your eyes doesn't make them go away, you really can't, because the ways people try to forget them are themselves the reminders.

In the end, most people are simply clinging onto each other's opinions of them and their actions because they only have a partial understanding due to fear. That partial understanding is because it takes a complete understanding to look at the world around you and see it like mathematicians describe their work, as a beautifully-posed problem with an elegant solution, and that is because negative information is more salient than positive, in addition to the fact of human psychology that people generally are too reliant on each others' opinions, which is itself largely due to the fear of other people.

[Metamorph]

Influenced? When did this happen?

In the past. Don't you see that none of the arguments you or Subteigh used against his points were even remotely new? You already had a response because you have already experienced the same thing he did before, even if it wasn't him doing it the first time.

[Fluffy Princess Unicorn]

In the past. Don't you see that none of the arguments you or Subteigh used against his points were even remotely new? You already had a response because you have already experienced the same thing he did before, even if it wasn't him doing it the first time.

My. That's quite an assumption. Does that imply that all of your own arguments are practiced, rehearsed, and memorized? You might want to stay out of debates with others if they are.

"Influenced" is quite a word to select when referring to someone who chooses to reply to a person, too.

[tripod]

why debate about religion when the science is already settled??? a large proportion (99%+) of evolutionary scientists (scientific consensus) are in agreement that God is simply a myth fabricated by ripping off older traditions of the ancient pagan babylonian religions from the bronze age. the idea of god having a son trying to save humanity is not a new concept. the christian god is simply a ripping off of these older traditions

jesus simply did not exist as there is no actual data and empirical evidence to go by. claiming otherwise is simply mental illness and finding inherently faulty systems to cope with the tragedies of life. i get it, life is hard, but trying to pray to some pie in the sky who throws lightning bolts from their ass in the clouds is not the answer to lifes problems.

the answer to lifes problems is not to look into these plagarized books (see the two-source hypothesis that @FreelancePoliceman brought up) written by crazy old men trying to get attention. i could write a man-made bible easily with my eyes closed using only my left foot. your life problems aren't solve by a stupid book. it is actually solved by looking underneath and reaching deep inside of you.... you'll soon realize that you had the divine inside of you all along. you are god underneath. you are love and vibrations.

when we can get our heart centers to operate and flutter at higher frequencies, we can melt away lifes problems.

most of everyone here is operating at a lower frequency (100 mhtz).... but we can actually achieve higher and higher (10,000+ mhtz) wavelengths depending on our mantras and the stories we tell ourselves each day. love is the highest frequency we can operate in.

try meditation and saying positive mantras in the morning instead of participating in religious discussions, we don't live in the stone ages anymore. we are simply a byproduct of our ancestors who survived through all the harsh atrocities to build up the society and civilization we live in today, that, along with doing some yoga and semen retention helped me tremendously. i personally like meditating under a tree wearing a buddha hat

also, i hike mt everest on the weekends. there's something about higher altitudes that expands your rib cage, allowing more oxygen to flow into your capillaries, thus improving your well-being and state of mind. none of this religious trash is required

[tripod]

Atheism is unstoppable and growing rapidly in almost every developed country, including Japan. This is probably due to better education and the ability to question what once was thought to be a sin – to question religious authorities. Don’t get me wrong, having no religion is as bad as being a religious fanatic, more often than not, a religion stops being a religion and becomes a cult when the followers follow the teachings blindly.

[tripod]

This dude is my spirit animal, ground breaking new discoveries nobody has come across.

F*ckin genius level shit right here

[Metamorph]

They had been talking, it seemed, about Jesus Christ. The fact was that the editor had commissioned the poet to write a long anti-religious poem for one of the regular issues of his magazine. Ivan Nikolayich had written this poem in record time, but unfortunately the editor did not care for it at all. Bezdomny had drawn the chief figure in his poem, Jesus, in very black colours, yet in the editor's opinion the whole poem had to be written again. And now he was reading Bezdomny a lecture on Jesus in order to stress the poet's fundamental error.

It was hard to say exactly what had made Bezdomny write as he had--whether it was his great talent for graphic description or complete ignorance of the subject he was writing on, but his Jesus had come out, well, completely alive, a Jesus who had really existed, although admittedly a Jesus who had every possible fault.

Berlioz however wanted to prove to the poet that the main object was not who Jesus was, whether he was bad or good, but that as a person Jesus had never existed at all and that all the stories about him were mere invention, pure myth.

https://www.masterandmargarita.eu/es...ita_glenny.pdf

[Renna]

Jesus’s look if he ever exist…

[Metanoia]

"Thou shall not kill." In terms of defending one's own family, community, and not allowing others to strip them of their religion, it's reasonable. There is no reason to kill non-believers unless they have intentions of causing harm.

Of course humans are not perfect, if we were, our societies would have been extremely stable and sin wouldn't cause the suffering of the world.

You make a fair point.

I'm not religious anymore honestly. I only have faith in myself.

[Metanoia]

I never much subscribed to any doctrine or organized religion, I always made my own practices and customs. I try to be educated on different cultures and religions, but I'm not a follower of any, really.

Church was always a safe haven growing up. I may have never believed in their teachings, but the community involvement was more than enough for me. Group gospels, community potlucks, and charity drives during Christmas was always fun and made younger me happier.

It's hard finding a good church these days. They all seem so superficial and only after the money. They do not care about people's struggles nor do they seek to understand it. They'll slap a "well the world is full of sin" on it before they even empathize with you and it's like... can't you just treat me as a person?

[Metamorph]

I'm not religious anymore honestly. I only have faith in myself.

Don't believe in yourself.

[Metamorph]

I never much subscribed to any doctrine or organized religion, I always made my own practices and customs. I try to be educated on different cultures and religions, but I'm not a follower of any, really.

Church was always a safe haven growing up. I may have never believed in their teachings, but the community involvement was more than enough for me. Group gospels, community potlucks, and charity drives during Christmas was always fun and made younger me happier.

It's hard finding a good church these days. They all seem so superficial and only after the money. They do not care about people's struggles nor do they seek to understand it. They'll slap a "well the world is full of sin" on it before they even empathize with you and it's like... can't you just treat me as a person?

Maybe the problems with institutional Christianity are not problems with religion in general?

[Metamorph]

People coming from a Christian background always seem to think all religions basically work the same way and it's just about faith without evidence. On the other hand, I tend to doubt even Christianity was like that. Saying that we walk by faith and not by sight didn't seem to be intended to be particularly metaphorical for believing things without evidence, it literally just seemed to refer to believing in things that the people of the time had evidence for but it wasn't, you know, direct sensory evidence that they could physically see in front of them with their eyes. There are a lot of other passages about how Jesus is doing things that were prophesied, but the things he did that were prophesied were things like healing people's injuries and illnesses, casting out demons, and raising Lazarus. All of that would've been really direct evidence, it would just be evidence for things people knew about through non-sensory sources such as the Jewish Scriptures. If you see some guy and his disciples doing those things, what are you going to think? People always do so much of what a Muslim guy I know calls eisegesis of the Bible, reading into it things they already expect. The Catholics have a working defense of this practice since they say they are going by church traditions that were established and not recorded in the Bible, even though the Protestants always point out in turn that even they use Scripture to justify not solely relying on Scripture.

However, the idea of religion as just being believing whatever arbitrary thing in some kind of fashion many physicists would call symmetry breaking, as if there were no reason to believe one religion over another than pure indeterminism and chance as if God played dice with people's faiths, is so engrained in the West. When you look at someone like Sam Harris, he is essentially devoutly religious, he's just a devoutly religious Buddhist and Buddhism has a different idea of religion than what he'd associate to the idea of religion due to his upbringing in the West and, much more importantly, the reinforcement of his social group. I used to be in exactly the same place, identifying with all the agnostics and atheists despite the fact I believed in God because the social groups around religion in most of the West have very particular viewpoints that are completely orthogonal to any thinking person's, even if this also means the atheists and agnostics do as well since the opposite viewpoint is by definition equally orthogonal. After all, 7% of self-described atheists believe in God. Good for them, which once upon a time was also me. Our language is confused, just as the Scriptures say, and the whole goal is to not be confused in speech because the real origin of language isn't communication, it's as Noam Chomsky said (even if he's an inside job,) it's thought.

[Metanoia]

Don't believe in yourself.

Watch me